"When I looked at Donald Trump Jr.’s email chain," writes Bunch, "I saw what may have been the smoking gun that could — could — eventually bring down Trump’s presidency, but I also saw a lot more." (Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cc)

Indeed, cable TV news anchors were so flummoxed that the president’s son had voluntarily posted the email thread on Twitter that some speculated for a few minutes that the disclosure must somehow be helpful to the younger Trump or his dad. Why else would he have released it? “I would be lying to you if I said I could explain almost any of this,” veteran Los Angeles Times political reporter Jackie Calmes blurted out on CNN.

It’s true that the emails don’t reveal what exactly was discussed in that Trump Tower meeting 13 months ago (Team Trump still insists the whole thing was a “nothingburger”), and there’s still no proof that aides to the future president knew for an absolute fact that Russia was going to — in the opinion of America’s top intelligence agencies — hack Democratic emails and churn out volumes of “fake news” to assist candidate Trump or, if they did, whether specific U.S. government favors were promised in return.

But what we do know now is all so damning: That the top aides to now-President Trump were not just willing but eager to meet with people they believed to be representatives of an adversary of the United States — under sanction for its military adventurism in Ukraine — in order to get dirt on the opposition candidate and tip the scales of our 2016 election. And that since those meetings, those same aides have gone to great lengths to lie or otherwise obscure the truth of their multiple contacts with key Russians.

But what about the moral implications? I know, all political candidates wade through the mud, and there are folks who’ve become millionaires digging up “oppo research.” All’s fair in love and war and politics, right? Except — Team Trump went into this particular deal with the devil knowing that Vladimir Putin wanted things in return — things that are clearly not in the interest of the U.S. citizens now served by the 45th president. That includes a tacit OK for Putin’s militarism in Ukraine, a possible green light for aggression in other hot spots like the Baltic states, a weakening of NATO and general disintegration of the U.S.-European alliance that has held together a fragile peace during our lifetimes. And he’s rewarding a butcher who murders journalists and political opponents. What happened in Trump Tower is the very reason that the U.S. Constitution and our legal code are larded with provisions to prevent foreign meddling in our internal affairs.

But moral actions require a moral universe. Yes, much of the blame belongs with Trump — a dangerous and, to be brutally honest, sick narcissist with no empathy for anyone, not even his son, who might be headed soon to Allenwood — his family and his sycophants who stop at nothing to amass power and wealth. But let’s be even more honest. Much as ABC’s Amerika predicted three decades ago, the Russians were able to mess with our presidential election in part because we let them. The Trump family doesn’t know much outside of crude marketing, and were desperate for Hillary’s emails because they knew there was a willing audience eager to gobble up that material, people who shared a belief that hatred for the Other, for those know-it-all liberal elites, meant so much more than caring about where the purloined emails came from. Sure, the Russians could build up a “content farm” of 1,000 people churning out fake news about Hillary, but that ploy wouldn’t have worked if your American uncles and cousins and neighbors weren’t so excited to share their output on Facebook.

When I looked at Donald Trump Jr.’s email chain today, I saw what may have been the smoking gun that could — could — eventually bring down Trump’s presidency, but I also saw a lot more. I saw the symptoms of a deeper sickness in American politics — the ridiculously blurred lines among entertainment, political discourse, wealth, and what once passed for reality, with concert promoters and sleazy developers accustomed to making deals over the Miss Universe pageant and cutting pop-music videos instead plotting to put an unqualified man’s finger on the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. And a win-at-all-costs, destroy-your-opponent, “I love it” culture that doesn’t even have the phrase “but this is wrong” in its vocabulary. In other words, I saw the “moral flabbiness” — a casual willingness to destroy everything that America was supposed to stand for — that the New York Times didn’t think was in our national character less than two generations ago. And it was building up for a long time before that fateful nanosecond when Donald Trump Jr. finally hit the “send” button.

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Further

This week marks what would have been the 80th birthday of Jonathan Daniels, Episcopalian seminarian, civil rights activist, witness and martyr after he took the shotgun blast from an Alabama racist meant for black teenager Ruby Sales. An "ordinary man who saw great evil and responded with love," Daniels was 26. Today, Sales upholds his memory and mission as theologian and advocate. "I didn’t carry his death as a burden of guilt or as a weight," she says. "I carried it as a commitment."

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